Wikipedia Founder Releases Personal Appeal

brian0918 writes "In an apparent reply to the low turnout for their fourth quarter fundraiser, Wikipedia founder Jimbo Wales has just released a personal appeal for donations to the Wikimedia Foundation. 'Wikipedia is soon to enter our 6th year online, and I want to take a moment to ask you for your help in continuing our mission. Wikipedia is facing new challenges and encountering new opportunities, and both are going to require major funds.'" The fund drive will run until Friday, January 6th.

Comments

why we need money

[midom]

Obviously donated money doesn't go to someone's Porsche budget. All expenses are shown in public budget reports. All purchases are shown in purchase reports. All of them can be seen on http://wikimediafoundation.org/ - it's quite transparent there.

Running a read-only site would be much easier, we could do that with much smaller budget. What money is spent for - supporting collaboration infrastructure. We're running on 100 servers now, all quite cheap and efficient. We're pumping out 500mbps of information now, but we're still doing that low budget. But it all needs to grow and scale, and though software is doing that quite well, resources are needed.

This is very low-budget operation, comparing to other huge sites. There's no corporate funding, no huge revenue streams. I've seen sites running with same budgets but only 1% of Wikipedia's load. A donation made will go into collaboration infrastructure, rather than being forgotten forever. A donation made may allow thousands of articles to be created, extended and viewed. There is a price for information, but you won't find lower margins ;-)

Re:How can they survive non-commercially?

[Joe Decker]

I'm not certain if I want to give to Wiki without knowing how the money is used. I don't mind supporting dozens of servers and bandwidth fees, but I don't want to see the founder driving a Porsche.

There's a budget on-line, a quick read of it shows that the founder isn't paid a salary. Still, I do understand your point, I aim my charitable donations and volunteer work very carefully myself.